1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a document formation, input, control and processing automation and more particularly to the recognition of printed and handwritten characters from a bit-mapped image file.
2. Prior Art
According to traditional methods, document processing comprises either document formation in printed form on a paper media, and further input thereof, commonly manually or by scanning and recognition at the point of accepting, processing, registering and storing. But for all that, both methods do not guarantee the absence of errors. During manual input most of errors are due to the peculiarities of a human as an operator. An automated input via scanning and recognition causes errors due to the probabilistic base of recognition methods.
Automated document input and recognition is used in a bank automated system and specifically in payment document input, according to which the point of accepting documents is equipped with an optical scanner, connected to a computer, where the recognition process is performed. The system performs the payment document scanning and further text recognition, i.e. uses the probabilistic methods that can cause errors. In the said system the verification is performed by an operator causing the decrease of system productivity in comparison with fully automated control.
Known systems uses various kinds of supplementary machine readable data storage means to achieve various technical results.
Traditionally a bar-code is used in connection with documents or goods for assigning to them a unique machine-readable identification number for automated registration or recordation purposes. The following US patents can be an example of this—U.S. Pat. No. 5,640,647 issued Jun. 17, 1997, U.S. Pat. No. 6,276,535 issued Aug. 21, 2001, U.S. Pat. No. 6,085,975 issued Jul. 11, 2000, U.S. Pat. No. 5,844,221 issued Dec. 1, 1998, U.S. Pat. No. 5,804,806 issued Sep. 8, 1998, U.S. Pat. No. 5,682,819 issued Nov. 4, 1997, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,493,107 issued Feb. 20, 1996.
The main inadequacy of traditional systems is a limitation of bar-code use mainly for identification number storage. For example, system of mail items registration and service, according to U.S. Pat. No. 6,101,487 issued Aug. 8, 2000, proposes postal requisites coding and inserting into a bar-code, marked on a mail item for automation of passing it through process to the addressee. As mentioned previously, the inadequacy of such a system is through the different sources from which a human operator and a computer get the address data, and the impossibility of an operator to visually control the barcode data.
One more known system involves enhancing security of gaming tickets (tickets in game business) by embodying a machine-readable indicium (preferably bar-code) into payout ticket from a gaming machine, is proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,110,044 issued Aug. 29, 2000. This system does not suppose mass ticket processing with automated data comparison between text and bar-code sections of each ticket. The data verification is performed visually for each winning ticket and is not a quick process. The main disadvantage of the method is its unfitness for automated verification of text data with that of bar-code.
Another known method deals with a bar-code used for document registration purposes in an automated specialized database (U.S. Pat. No. 6,356,923 issued Mar. 12, 2002). According to it a registration card is marked by a bar-code containing accounting data and a table of contents of the document in coded form. Said table of contents has no room on the card in text form. The system either does not support automated verification or confirmation of the text data via bar-code data.
In the automated system of payment document formation and control, proposed in patent RU #2190252 Sep. 27, 2002, a bar-code, either one- or two-dimensional, is used for providing automatic document input. All significant data of a payment document of standard form is written to a bar-code printed on the spare space of the document. The system is provided with a special device for bar-code data input. Payment document data read from bar-code is directed to the further bank processing and storage. A mutual data confirmation between bar-code and text is not provided.
The system does not sufficiently prevent falsification, since the text portion of a document and its bar-code portion can contain different transaction details that cannot be verified visually. The differences may concern payment sum, beneficiary details etc. The falsification safeness is especially important for payment documents, that are the main subject of the said patent.
To increase the falsification safeness of text or/and bar-code data the said system needs to include supplemental visual verification of text data in conformity with bar-code data, and that will require involving a human operator for processing and thus considerably decrease system productivity.
So, all known methods are highly limited in ability to automate data input and confirmation and thus they cannot be used for achieving the declared technical result.